Service mesh – Trick or Treat?

‘Service mesh’ is a term that is relatively new and has gained visibility in the past year. It’s a configurable infrastructure layer for a microservices application that makes communication between service instances flexible, reliable, and fast.

Why are people talking about ‘service meshes’?

Modern applications contain a range of (micro)services that allow it to run effectively. Load balancing, traffic management, routing, security, user authentication – all of these things need to work together properly if the application is going to function as intended.. Managing these various services, across a whole deployment of containers, poses a challenge for those responsible for updating and maintaining them.

How does a service mesh work?

Enter the Service mesh. It works delivering these services from within the compute cluster through a set of APIs. These APIs, when brought together, form the ‘mesh’.. This makes it much easier to manage software infrastructures of particular complexity – hence why organizations like Netflix and Lyft have used them..

Trick or treat?

With the service meshes addressing some of the key challenges when it comes to microservices, this is definitely a treat for 2018 and beyond.